I’ve been fascinated by a phrase that I’ve heard for a while now coming out of certain circles of old-school netrunners like me. It’s being used as a mantra and a rallying cry for the rebellion against surveillance capitalism and the prevailing notion of people as product. What is this phrase? “We’re taking back the Internet we were promised.”
But what exactly were we promised that the Internet would be?
Well, for those of us in the early days of the Internet, this meant a “free and open exchange of ideas”. And as the Internet grew, and the World Wide Web was born, that meant global exchange of ideas. These ideas took many forms: words, pictures, sound, video, and even software. It is worth noting that the mysterious and titillating black-market “darknet” is essentially the only current survivor of the original web that we were promised, and the closest approximation to that ideal that weathered the onslaught of capitalism.
The transition from “free & open” to “walled gardens with CCTV” (and hopefully soon back again to free & open) led to some interesting cultural shifts. Let’s take a tour of what that culture was like through the eyes of a young computer geek, Yours Truly.
Geeks And… Everyone Else
For quite a while, there were two main classes of computer users when computers became commodities: those who used computers as tools but weren’t technical enough to modify them in any way (let’s call them “normies”) and the geeks who had deep enough understanding that not only could they program them to do just about whatever they wanted, but they understood everything about their hardware and architecture and built their own rigs (let’s call them “techies”). The techie class was fascinated by these new machines and obsessively wanted to know everything about them and they realized that this device was a key to unlocking global knowledge and communication.
To the normies, us techies were like techno-wizards or some sort of machine whisperers. We had our own language and social structures and talked about things that normies just couldn’t comprehend. We would spend hours reading and consuming articles and code snippets from magazines (which of course we had to try for ourselves which resulted in spending more hours typing the code into our machines). But prior to the internet, this was mostly a solitary affair, especially for those of us that were young enough not to have jobs or our own transportation. We found these machines and the possibilities that were contained within it more interesting than our local worlds around us.
Most of us didn’t have a lot of friends for multiple reasons, the primary one being that there usually wasn’t a high enough concentration of other techies around us with which to hang out and talk about things we were interested in; most people around us weren’t interested in all that “geek stuff”. That all changed when 2 things happened: modems got cheaper and BBSes were born (and later, online services and ISPs). All of a sudden, we could now connect with other enthusiasts not only in our home town but also in our local region and sometimes even with people in different states!
We were finally able to find our peers and some mentors! If one had a question, the BBS was where to ask it. Everything was shared there - discussions, games, software, and other files. You may have heard of Shareware - software that was distributed at a low cost that had, as part of its license, the stipulation that the user would share that software with at least a few others. But prior to cheap modems, this involved shipping through “snail mail”; the BBS finally allowed for digital distribution and traded shipping costs for an individual downloader’s phone bill charges.
Is it any wonder that the geeks would rather stay online for hours with people that understood them rather than be with people in real life with whom they couldn’t relate and who couldn’t relate to them?
Global Communication
Once I got to Uni however, that’s where I was exposed to the REAL Internet. My tiny little pond of local BBS pals and IRL nerds just got a whole lot bigger as I was thrown into the ocean of the Internet (and on a much bigger and faster university pipe).
Since the Internet was built primarily for the military and government and academic institutions to swap research, universities were naturally on the list of nodes. Every student got an email address and rudimentary access to the tools and protocols that would make information sharing and research possible. But C.S. students got a lot more specialized access to even more tools and we had the will to use (and misuse) them. And usually, if you played your cards right, even more access or benefits (like increased home directory disk quota) could be gained by bribing the sysadmin in various ways. Ironically, one of the most important things I learned about hacking was the social engineering side of things by figuring out what my sysadmin wanted in return for giving me access to a PPP endpoint so that I could dial into the system from home and run NCSA Mosaic over the modem.
But this was before indexes and internet search engines existed, and so a lot of us either kept notebooks full of interesting sites (and ports) or maintained our own curated list of “cool sites” links on our webpages once personal homepages became a thing. There was even an Internet Yellow Pages book that was printed which acted as a directory of all sorts of cool sites around the web. I actually used to have my original copy of it up until very recently, but I fear it got mistakenly recycled by accident. The IYP was mainly for normies once the walled gardens of the online services got supplanted by direct access to the unfettered internet for normies via ISPs. There was a lot of interesting material in there to be sure, but if one really wanted the “good stuff” they weren’t going to find it there.
The two main sources for getting everything from software to questionable digital images were the BBSes that were still around and Usenet (which many BBSes became, or at least where their users migrated to when the BBS shut down). Usenet was broken into “newsgroups” with names that followed a domain-name-like dot hierarchy. The alt.binaries.* groups were by far the most popular because this is where all that digital content was stored. It was usually uploaded in multi-part formats and encoded (usually using the venerable uuencode encoding format), so we would spend hours downloading and linking all the parts together into one encoded file and then decoding the reconstituted file into the binary that we wanted to run.
Usenet was basically like what the fediverse is today, with each newsgroup being analogous to an instance. There were separate rules, conventions, and cultures in each group and the mantra was always “lurk for a couple of weeks to get the lay of the land before making your first post” because if you didn’t, you were in danger of starting a flame war or getting booted from the group. The flame wars were exhilarating, vitriolic, sometimes horrifying, usually entertaining, but almost always tedious. And people from all over the world would post in these groups which made the discussion-based groups an invaluable resource for attaining a global perspective on events.
The other place to make contacts and while away the hours was in chatrooms, also known as “talkers” in some parts of Europe. Whereas Usenet was fairly asynchronous in nature (like fedi posts), chats were real-time, all-text, terminal-based flurries of constant activity. I would telnet into a couple of my favorites to see who was on and then just wade into the stream. It was like being in a big lecture hall with anywhere from 5 to 100 people constantly just talking to one another. My most frequent online haunts back in the day were two UK-based chats that were named “Nilex Talker” and “Foothills”, and a US-based chat called “Surfers” (and of course, IRC).
When I took typing in high school (to learn how to type better on computers, thankyouverymuch), I could type around 65 words per minute. After my freshman year at college, I could type over 100 wpm due to my hours spent on chats. You had to keep up or get left behind! With so many people chatting at once, you had to read the conversation before it scrolled off the screen, write a response (and you could “whisper” to specific people for more private conversation), catch up on what you missed while you were typing that response, and then wash, rinse, and repeat for hours. Sometimes people would setup rooms for a much smaller group of friends for more focused chat, and one could always do 1-on-1 chats.
It was here that I really got my first global exposure. I had good friends that I met there from England, Ireland, Turkey, Germany, Spain, and France (and I’m sure other places). I would exchange emails and hand-written international snail mail with good friends from across the ocean, and even met some people in real life both that were near my university as well as one or two that came to visit the States from Europe. And I had a couple of romantic relationships that started online over distance. I would mail, call, and visit my girlfriends just like I would have if I had met them at home. Thanks to those chat programs, I started to see a whole different perspective other than just my American perspective that I had grown up with, and got to see that the more we were different, the more we were the same. The world had become suddenly a whole lot smaller, and I realized that I actually had friends in other countries that I could visit if I was ever able to make it abroad.
Freely talking with people from other countries and discussing things like governments, sexuality, ethnicity, social customs, and just day-to-day life was where I saw the absolute beauty and potential of this “free & open Internet” that we were promised. The possibilities seemed endless! I could literally find anyone, anywhere, that had answers to any question that I had. I could find all sorts of information that governments and authorities didn’t want me to see or even know about.
Looking back on it from here, it’s easy to see how nefarious people with a lust for power couldn’t resist trying to control it for their own ends. An informed populace is an uncontrollable populace.
”Cyber” Culture
All this Internet faffing about started to confuse and alarm the normies who didn’t understand how people could spend hours and hours online and have meaningful relationships. And then William Gibson and Bruce Sterling put their heads together and coined the term “cyberspace” and Neal Stephenson gave us the idea of “the matrix” and suddenly there was a new term for this new subculture which was, at that time, still a subculture (albeit a quickly growing one). For a while, everything Internet-related was “cyber” something-or-other, with the eventual business encroachment resulting in monikers of “e” this and “i” that, thanks to IBM and Apple, respectively.
It was also about this time, 1984 or so (maybe a little earlier), when the “hacker” and “punk” cultures were merged into the “cyberpunk” genre which was generally full of cautionary tales of how this new technology could go horribly wrong and be used to oppress humanity.
Hackers (and their related forks, phreakers and crackers, et al) have been around as long as there have been closed systems containing information under lock and key. And just like all things, there are “good” and “bad” versions of each. Prior to the “cyber” age, hackers were simply people that just took stuff apart to see how it worked and then put it back together, often with improvements or features that were beyond the scope of the original object. More and more computers started moving online which created what Maverick would call a “target rich environment”. Now all those curious hackers could explore a lot more systems all from their PCs at home, which started to breed fear and distrust amongst the normies.
Growing up as a geek and then taking a CS major in college, I knew that there was a divide between techies and normies. I knew that most people didn’t understand what I actually did in all those hours spent on the computer aside from playing games (everybody seemed to understand that). But I was surprised at how far along I got in my career while still running into people that saw me as some sort of technomancer that essentially communicated in hieroglyphics. And, as it turned out, were secretly afraid of me for all the negative reasons that the governments and media had painted “hackers” and “programmers” out to be.
I can recall one such exchange that took me aback a little bit. My age at the time was somewhere in my early ’30s (maybe 32-33) and I was having some people over to my apartment. I still had work to do on some project so I was sitting at my computer with my IDE open and working on some Java code. One of my friends got there early and came in while I was working, looked at my screen, and says, “This is what you work with all day? Like, you can actually read that stuff?” I replied, “sure. I mean it’s basically just like learning another language like Spanish or something but that basically logically describes the order of steps in which to do things.” She paused for a moment (I could tell she was trying to conceptualize this concept in her head) and then said, “well this all just looks like Chinese to me!“. Then I ran the program and she was just agog at the fact that “you mean all that nonsense translates into THAT?!? I just don’t get it!”
This whole notion really clicked into place for me right around the mid- to late-’90s when a slew of “hacker” movies came out in theaters: Hackers, The Net, and Antitrust were the three that I remember the most and seemed overly earnest and were trying so hard to be taken seriously but missed the mark so hard. But the divide between techies and normies came into stark relief when I got a panicked phone call from my mom after she watched The Net - she was really scared by it, and she wouldn’t do online shopping for years after it become commonplace just because of what she saw in that movie. I realized that all my geek friends that I knew would watch those movies as comedies, to laugh at just how terrible and unrealistic they were; meanwhile, normies were watching those movies and taking them as gospel because, like my friend from earlier, computer code might as well have looked like the fractal worm depiction of the virus from Hackers. They didn’t understand and no amount of explaining would allay their fears, and a lack of understanding breeds fear and confusion.
It finally clicked and made sense: this is how my parents and non-technical friends see me. We would always wear comfortable clothes because we sat in front of computers for hours every day, we always wanted to have necessary gear with us so we needed bags and backpacks for laptops and cables and stuff, and we were always online because we had friends and relationships literally all over the world. And we were looking for information because “information wants to be free”. It’s not that we didn’t have relationships, it’s just that we weren’t bound by physical proximity or social convention. We talked in terms of code, inside jokes, and chat shorthand. We obsessed over silly movies and TV shows. We traded music, images, software, and movies.
We went online to get away from those that didn’t understand us and instead find our people. We established communities and friendships online. It became like our version of Cheers - we went to the place where everybody knew our name (or rather, our handle). We could be whoever we wanted to be and we could indulge our passions and hobbies, and collectively spend years debating the latest X-Files episode. It didn’t matter where you were from or what was going on in your meatspace existence; when you were online, you were family; you were connected.
But to the normies on the outside, we might as well have been speaking Klingon (which, to be fair, quite a few of us could also do). To them, if you knew how to program a computer and “surf the web”, you could control anything electronic and they sort of held you in reverence, awe, and not a little fear simply because they could not understand the limitations of the technology. It kind of reminds me of all the myths surrounding the ninja and their powers. Maybe that’s why competent engineers were later referred to by the pretentiously hyperbolic term “code ninja”.
And then somehow, geeks suddenly became the new rock stars and really could seemingly control everything, commanding insane salaries and extravagant perks and altering entire urban centers with the new tech mindset. Suddenly, being a geek was fashionable and no longer worthy of relegating to the company basement under harsh fluorescent lighting hidden away from the sun like so many morlocks.
But that was a new era, and a story for a different time.
